You Can Hear Yourself Eat

Beverly Stephen -
December 2013

Brooklyn, New York—Walk into Antica Pesa in hippest Williamsburg and the first thing you notice is a pattern of giant white hemispherical lampshades interspersed with a set of white circles as big as a harvest moon. And no deafening noise! The circles are acoustical fiberglass panels. “Our concern was noise,” says designer BARC studio’s Clementina Ruggieri. “Normally, acoustical panels are ugly and pricy, but we found these circular ones, which serve the technical purpose and add to the design. “Antica Pesa, which is the sister to a restaurant founded in 1922 in the Trastevere section of Rome, means antique weighing scale,” Ruggieri says. “So we took the circular shape [of the plates] and repeated it throughout the space.”